The road to reconciliation: we're in the fog but we're making progress

Think about history, pre Mabo, even our recent history of Noonkanbah and the political overpowering of land rights and compare it with the preamble of the Native Title Act which codifies – for the benefit of the majority society – the way and how the system deals with native title. Note that the Act carefully validates every government title, even if invalidly issued without regard to Aboriginal interests. Note that it provides for the creation of new titles over Aboriginal land which may diminish or extinguish native title and that the Aborigines have no right of veto over this, although necessarily they have right to compensation. But because native title is a legal right, the Constitutional protection against expropriation of property without compensation applies so Aboriginal people have to be in the system as stake holders, not as supplicants.

Mabo and the Native Title Act have brought about a new era of negotiation between the two visions. It is still imperfect and Aboriginal participants in the process complain about the deficiencies as loudly as some elements in the dominant society and economy. But, led by Federal governments through the establishment of the underlying principles of seeking negotiated outcomes in the Native Title Act, and in a practical sense by the mining industry for which land access is a critical issue, negotiation and accommodation are the new order. Every major mining company in Australia now has as an important part of its operations a capacity to engage with Aboriginal people and their cultural concerns. This in turn has led to an emphasis on Aboriginal employment and training that responds to Aboriginal demands for access to the real economy. The Chamber of Mines provided me with the information that confirms widespread engagement and employment, training and agreement making.

Of course the accommodations can never be perfect. Each party has a legitimate interest of social and economic importance. Those interests happen to be fundamentally inconsistent in development versus preservation terms but now the goal is some agreed accommodation rather than winner-take-all.

The Warburton community captured the dilemma for them, the Aborigines, in an art exhibition and book entitled Trust. It includes a series of extraordinarily beautiful images of land and mining. But for me, a person of words, the essays in the book, the oral expressions of viewpoint by the Aboriginal land owners, conveyed at best the ongoing loss Aboriginal people feel at the desecration of country and their contemporaneous understanding of the need for the economic engagement that their future as well as ours demands.

On the other side of the frontier, the side from which I come, the possibilities of the new order were captured for me by the words of a leader of the great Rio Tinto mining house, who said that this new accommodation was a great opportunity to do what was morally right and commercially advantageous. This, I believe, is the voice of the future and I think it is better than the old way and I think it indicates that we are making progress.

The new post-Mabo order, and even post-Mabo disorder, contains the seeds for a more moral and more successful country. At the time of Nookanbah, Ian Viner (my predecessor in Aboriginal Affairs) and I argued for an accommodation of interests, for a greater taking into account of the Aboriginal vision. We are still in a fog over many aspects of that new process of accommodation. Great Aboriginal leaders like Noel Pearson draw our attention to the faults and difficulties in what we are doing. But when I see respectful interactions between the rich and the powerful and the people of alternative vision until recently ignored but who have refused to give up their vision, I have hope. I do in fact believe that we are in this particular way moving in the direction of true reconciliation, we are undertaking that journey.